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The work has been completed at the City-County Building on the air conditioner replacement. The air conditioner unit has been left on top of the roof, altering the roofline of the building and to a very small degree, the downtown skyline. The following is from an email sent to me by Mike Green with the Allen County Public Information Director. I sent an email asking about the project, specifically if the project was finished and the air conditioning unit would remain on the roof. His response:
The following information comes courtesy of Dan Freck, head of the Allen County Building Manager’s Department:
The cooling tower project is to be done no later than the end of March. The two engineering firms that we hired to help us with this project are Design Collaborative and Engineering Resources. The life expectancy of the cooling tower itself is about 20 years. Keeping this in mind, we decided to move the tower up to the roof. If the tower goes bad at that time, all they would have to do is crane it off. This would allow us to use that room then for more energy efficient equipment. In that area, we installed a holding tank for the chemically treated water for the tower, a sand filter for the water, high pressure pumps for more water pressure up there, a heat exchanger for off peak heating and/or cooling days, variable frequency drives for night programming, and etc. Therefore, the tower will stay as is. We had a cost to enclose the tower but we felt we could use that money for more energy equipment.
To be fair, many downtown buildings have cooling towers or other similiar items visible on their rooflines. While it would have been nice to maintain the integrity of the roofline, hat’s off to the County for saving the money for other, more worthwhile uses.
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